Monday, July 2, 2012

Lives of Our Leaders: The President and the Intern

What does it feel like to be a White House intern and give
fellatio to the president of the United States? Only a groupie who followed one
of the great rock bands like Van Halen could probably answer the question, though the recent four hour PBS documentaryClintonindicates that the 11 years after the end of the Clinton presidency, the shockwaves of the incident have not been eradicated. This
is not a matter of morality or consequences for either a president or an
intern. Rather it’s a question for neurologists who examine the central nervous
system and the question is, what is the effect of an enormous psycho-sexual
event on the synapses, axons and dendrites which make up the pleasure centers of the
brain. We know that the prefrontal cortex is responsible for so called
executive functioning and that pleasure emanates from the amydala
or so called mid brain area, but when a major historical figure unzips his fly
and allows an oral sexual event to take place with someone who could only
become part of history because of this event itself, then there is something
causing the great historical figure and the person who is still just the
equivalent of protoplasm to throw caution to the wind. Is it the actual
distance between the pleasure centers and the areas that are responsible for
morality, ethics and conscience that’s the problem? FMRI’s are able to track
how the brain responds to varying kinds of stimulation. However, the problem is
that to study such an event you would need subjects with unimpeachable integrity willing to don an apparatus
in advance of the transgression--a tall order indeed!

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.